Broadcast News

Broadcast News has a lot of interesting things to say about television. But the thing it does best is look into a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of relationship. Read full review

In a film tracing the endless battles between style and substance, Brooks delivers both in abundance. Read full review

Broadcast News grows in your memory. It recalls an era when movies were made by, for and with three-dimensional characters you cared about. Let's hope it doesn't take James L. Brooks another four years to make another one. We can't wait that long. [25 Dec 1987, p.53]

Enormously entertaining, Broadcast News is an inside look at the personal and professional lives of three TV journlists. Read full review

Broadcast News is so diabolically clever that you rather expect it to be heartless, in the way that so much surface cleverness can be. No such thing. Heartless is the wrong word for this movie: It's insightful and understanding and marvelous fun, while giving up none of its thoughtfulness. [16 Dec 1987, p.1]

The dialogue in "Broadcast News" is so quick and clever I wanted to see the movie again the minute it ended because I knew I couldn't have possibly caught it all. I caught most of it though, and certainly enough to know that this is one terrific movie. [15 Dec 1987, p.1]

In this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy, all the performers are tops. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

Broadcast News would be nearly perfect, except for its final few minutes. Read full review

A film whose "TV movie" feel is at once incredibly appropriate and a notable drawback, Broadcast News is nevertheless worthy adult entertainment. Read full review

Broadcast News is the crispest, classiest entertainment; it has what Hollywood has been missing. [16 Dec 1987, p.8]

Love has become a tired movie theme, but rarely is it relegated to a subplot as it is in Broadcast News. That's just one of the reasons that makes James Brooks' ingenious film a different sort of movie. Another is how it subtly reveals the complex mingling of work lives and love lives, showing how they feed each other and, indeed, feed off each other, careers devouring entire relationships in hungry 30-second sound bites. [10 Jan 1988, p.17]

News is right, completely right, until it slips just a bit at the end.By that time it hardly matters because you've seen the best of the holiday films, as well as the most all-around entertaining movie of 1987 - a bittersweet media comedy-drama that surpasses its potential. [16 Dec 1987, p.1D]

Mr. Brooks's screenplay overstates matters both at the beginning of the film and at the end, with a prologue that strains to be cute and an epilogue that is just unnecessary. In between, however, the movie is a sarcastic and carefully detailed picture of a world Mr. Brooks finds fascinating and also a little scary. Read full review

Director Brooks masterfully interconnects this human triangle with the breakneck world of broadcasting -- the professional frenzy behind the news. He shifts the mood from romantic to farcical, the comedy from broad to subtle. Read full review

As it turns out, big secrets aren't revealed in Broadcast News, but the film is so ingratiatingly high-spirited, and the performances so full of sass and vigor, that in the long run it doesn't really matter much. Read full review

The film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated. Read full review

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]